she had just been looking through Count Anteoni’s field-glasses, the man who had fled from prayer in the “Garden of Allah.”  As she glanced at the empty chair standing before the knives and forks, and the white cloth, she was uncertain whether she wished it to be filled by the traveller or not.  She felt his presence in Beni-Mora as a warring element.  That she knew.  She knew also that she had come there to find peace, a great calm and remoteness in which she could at last grow, develop, loose her true self from cramping bondage, come to an understanding with herself, face her heart and soul, and—­as it were—­look them in the eyes and know them for what they were, good or evil.  In the presence of this total stranger there was something unpleasantly distracting which she could not and did not ignore, something which roused her antagonism and which at the same time compelled her attention.  She had been conscious of it in the train, conscious of it in the tunnel at twilight, at night in the hotel, and once again in Count Anteoni’s garden.  This man intruded himself, no doubt unconsciously, or even against his will, into her sight, her thoughts, each time that she was on the point of giving herself to what Count Anteoni called “the desert spirits.”  So it had been when the train ran out of the tunnel into the blue country.  So it had been again when she leaned on the white wall and gazed out over the shining fastnesses of the sun.  He was there like an enemy, like something determined, egoistical, that said to her, “You would look at the greatness of the desert, at immensity, infinity, God!—­Look at me.”  And she could not turn her eyes away.  Each time the man had, as if without effort, conquered the great competing power, fastened her thoughts upon himself, set her imagination working about his life, even made her heart beat faster with some thrill of—­what?  Was it pity?  Was it a faint horror?  She knew that to call the feeling merely repugnance would not be sincere.  The intensity, the vitality of the force shut up in a human being almost angered her at this moment as she looked at the empty chair and realised all that it had suddenly set at work.  There was something insolent in humanity as well as something divine, and just then she felt the insolence more than the divinity.  Terrifically greater, more overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man, feebler, vaguer.  Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread—­all at the desert’s expense—­by the distant moving figure seen through the glasses?

Yes, as she looked at the little white table and thought of all this, Domini began to feel angry.  But she was capable of effort, whether mental or physical, and now she resolutely switched her mind off from the antagonistic stranger and devoted her thoughts to the priest, whose narrow back she saw down the room in the distance.  As she ate her fish—­a mystery of the seas of Robertville—­she imagined